


chromatin

by paintedpolarbear



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gen, M/M, Platonic Soulmates, Prompt Fill, Pynch Week, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, color-coded for your convenience, not strictly canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-14 21:05:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15397419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paintedpolarbear/pseuds/paintedpolarbear
Summary: chromatin, n. a complex and poorly-understood macro-molecule necessary for the proper storage and function of DNA; here used to mean the patterning of pigment on one's skin associated with physical contact with one's soulmate(s)Pynch Week '18, Day 1: Soulmate Marks AU





	chromatin

The colors first appeared slowly when Adam was ten, one by one, spreading in speckles and lines over his skin like they did for everybody else.

 

A scuff of aquamarine across his knuckles. Spring green pooled in the lines of his palm. Twin blotches of blue-white and charcoal-gray on his shoulders. Watery stripes of yellow on his upper back.

 

(No red. Never red.)

 

(Red was so rare, anyway. Few and far between were even the older adults sporting a splash of red, let alone teenagers. Why should someone like him expect to wake up with a developing red Mark?)

 

(Why did he care?)

 

The Marks shifted in size and shape over the years, becoming brighter, larger, more intricate. When Adam was in middle school they were streaks of pastels, a child playing with chalk. Now they could have almost been tasteful tattoos, vivid and refined, a subtle detail etched in the patterning of the pigments.

 

There were other Marks, too. Small things that dotted his arms and sides, still pale and barely visible, nothing  _ impending _ . Nothing that would change his life in the next twelve to twenty-four hours, which was all he cared about.

 

And of course, there were the  _ other _ marks, the ones that lasted a week or two, that had little to do with soulmates at all.

 

He hardly thought about them. He didn’t have the time or the energy to waste worrying about the clutter of people bonded to his soul or whatever.

* * *

A loud, gaudy-orange, pre-’69 Camaro sprawled wearily on the gravel shoulder of the highway, its hood raised in defeat. A  _ Richard Campbell Gansey the Third,  _ a Raven Boy among Raven Boys, slouched over the engine. Adam slowed. It was an odd thing to see  _ that _ particular raven-breasted sweater superimposed onto this scenario—broken-down car, in need of assistance, clearly unable to lubricate this particular rough patch with the judicious application of money. His curiosity was officially piqued.

 

“Lose something?” he asked, trying not to sound too interested or douchey or townie. Richard Gansey almost knocked his own head off, he reared back so fast. When he spotted Adam, he honest-to-God beamed.

 

“Lost may not be the right word for it, but if you know anything about cars, I sure could use some help.” His accent was old-money-silken, butter-smooth and Adam nearly hated him for it. Instead he peered under the hood without touching anything or leaning against the frame and pointed out that  _ this drive belt is cracked, see, there—but that’s an easy fix,  _ and _ that rattling noise is probably a loose piston, it’s not hurting anything. _

 

Richard didn't have the right tools or any spare parts so Adam said, “You're gonna have to call a tow—”

 

Richard was already dialing— _ yes, I'm on the northbound side of highway seven, a few miles after the Sisk Avenue turn-off—yes, bright orange, you can't miss it— _

 

Adam had to smile a little to himself. He hadn't personally worked on this car, but the other mechanics had, seventeen times in a year and a half between them. This kid had the garage’s number memorized.

 

Boyd himself pulled up in the tow truck half an hour later, winched the Camaro onto the bed with his usual reserved stoicism, permitted Adam and Richard to pile into the passenger seat, and pulled into the garage without saying anything to either of them other than, “Cutting it a little fine, kid,” in Adam’s general direction as he put the truck in park.

 

Adam flushed and hurried into the back room of the shop to change.

 

When he walked into the waiting room two hours later with the clipboard and pen, Richard leapt from his chair and started reading over the invoice. Then he said, “Do you need a ride home?”

 

Adam said, a little sheepishly, “My shift doesn't end ‘til nine.”

 

“I can come pick you up. I owe you that much.”

 

“Actually, you owe me forty-seven fifty.” He pointed to the line for Services Rendered. “For the new drive belt. You're lucky you brought it in when you did.”

 

Richard pinned his credit card—Adam bit down a wave of jealousy; Raven Boys were half the customer base and their parents’ money kept him gainfully  employed—under the clipboard’s hinge and scribbled on the signature line. Adam took it behind the desk and started ringing him up.

 

“You still stopped and asked if I needed help. You didn't have to do that. Please allow me to repay you for that. Plus, I know you sit in front of me in Anglo Lit, your grade is way better than mine. I want to know what you think of Milton. Or we could talk about something other than school. It's up to you.” He shrugged as though Adam’s answer wasn't one of his top ten priorities.

 

Adam considered this as he ran the card. Richard acted like he was desperate for friends, and though Adam wasn't, he could stomach a benign conversation about  _ Paradise Lost _ for one night, and he could use the break. And, odds were good that he would show up with a greasy fast-food bag on the passenger seat and say  _ oh, I forgot about that, you're welcome to it, I think the fries are still warm.  _ His stomach growled.

 

“Okay then, I'll see you at nine,  _ Richard Gansey.”  _ He read the name off the card like he didn't already know it.

 

“Just ‘Gansey’ will do.” Gansey, smiling, replaced the card in his wallet and extended his knuckles for a fist bump. “I’ll see you at nine.” Adam, baffled, obliged.

 

His hand exploded with sensation, pleasant and tingling and hot. Startled, he yanked back and stared at his hand. The spots of aquamarine were bright and stunning, shot with lines of dark teal and silvery-pale green almost to his fingertips and climbing to his wrist in an intricate cloud. He looked at Gansey, who was looking at his own hand that was stained pine-forest-green and brassy-gold and near-black. Gansey looked up at Adam with a grin, and Adam found he was smiling, too.

* * *

"And this is Monmouth,” said Gansey, twisting the key this way and that in the discolored lock. Adam shrugged his bag higher on his shoulder.

 

“You live in a factory?” he asked incredulously, looking around at the mossy brick face, the unkempt grass, the tire marks in the overgrown gravel drive stretching out to the road a half-mile away.

 

Gansey finally got the door open. It swung inward on loud, rusty hinges and revealed a vast empty space, lit by windows only. “Technically, my parents own it, but they’re letting me and Lynch stay here as long as we're in school. It's cheaper than a dorm.” He flicked the second-story light on as they cleared the landing. “And I can sell it after I graduate.”

 

Adam left that alone. His head was on a swivel, taking in the the water stains on all the concrete things, the cheap rusted-iron balcony around the edge of the half-story, the all-frosted-glass formerly-a-managerial-office doors along the wall, the insomniac-history-professor look of the belongings strewn across the...everywhere. It looked less like a place to live and more like a place to live out of. His stomach settled a little.

 

“Anyway,” Gansey continued, swinging open the first frosted-glass door. He kicked a box of rocks to the side so they wouldn't have to step over it. “Did you want to read the new chapter of Milton first, or start in on the homework problems from Baxster?”

 

“I wanna look at that Latin test, man.” Adam sat down on the unmade bed in the middle of the room—the only place to sit—and balanced his backpack on his knees. “What was Whelk thinking?”

 

“Well, he didn't give it back, so as much as I agree with you I'm afraid that would be a useless endeavor. Our poor grades will have to remain as they are for another day. So? Josten or Baxster?”

 

“Baxster, definitely. If I have to read a single one of Milton’s words tonight I might puke.”

 

While Gansey busied himself with the coffeepot, Adam fished around in his bag for their trigonometry textbook and the list of review questions they were to turn in, complete, by noon tomorrow. It was lengthy and mindless and completely pointless. He worried the fraying seam by the zipper with the pad of his thumb, calculating costs and the number of hours he’d worked that week and how many meals he’d already missed and how much more money he could hide—

 

“Do you need a new bag?”

 

Gansey was standing in the doorway holding two mugs of coffee. The thing about Gansey—the thing that drove Adam nuts—he wanted to  _ help _ . And he wanted you to  _ know _ he wanted to help.

 

“No,” said Adam instinctively, snatching his hand away from the seam. “I need coffee and a nap and maybe someone to blow my brain out so I don't have to look at this anymore.”

 

Gansey sat down on the bed, but he didn't offer either of the mugs to Adam. Instead, he stared at a spot on the wall and chewed on his lower lip. “I could get you one.”

 

“I have a backpack. It's right here.”

 

“A new one, I mean. That one looks like it's falling apart.”

 

“It’ll last.” Now Adam was becoming irritated. This was a conversation they’d had once and only once, a month ago, and Gansey had dropped it from the word  _ no. _ What did he think had changed?

 

“There's no reason to let it go until it's unusable. I assure you the purchase would be an inconsequential one.”

 

“What part of  _ no _ didn't you understand the first—”

 

_ “You should probably just let him do it. _ ” 

 

Adam yelped at the unexpected contact, hot and cold at once on his left shoulder. A boy had materialized at his left: colorless, out-of-focus, the raven crest on his sweater almost the clearest thing about his person. The boy rocked back on his heels and looked between the two of them with an expression that said  _ is there something I can do to make it better, puppies perhaps? _

 

“You didn't tell me you had a roommate,” Adam said to Gansey, which was a ridiculous thing to say: Adam had met Ronan many times and Gansey had said just that afternoon that he and Ronan lived together at Monmouth. Something about this other boy was sliding sideways in his mind and jumbling up all the rational things he was thinking.

 

“Oh.” Gansey frowned. “I forgot. That's Noah.” Noah waved obligingly.

 

Adam frowned in tandem, his heart still beating a little off-sync. Noah. Noah. Had he heard the name before? It had been his left shoulder. He looked—glanced, quickly: there was a smear of baby-blue-silver-white peeking out of his t-shirt, almost to the elbow. Okay. Cool. “What—?”

 

Noah rolled his eyes. “Just let him buy you a bag. It'll soothe his ego and you won't have to hear about it anymore. Don't worry, I won't let him get anything ugly.”

 

“I'm not worried about ugly.” What he was worried about was hiding an expensive purchase from his father's greedy eyes, but he realized he had already resigned himself to the fact of the gift. It would be convenient, useful even. “I'm worried about Baxster knocking my head off.”

 

They got to work, and no more was said about the bag until one morning the following week:

 

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Gansey, you didn't even cut the price tag off.”

* * *

It had taken a week of careful planning, a little covert investigation, and a little bit of luck, but he’d done it. He’d called the waitress from Nino’s and managed to hold a semi-coherent conversation for more than a couple of sentences. He’d even invited her to the exploratory venture they’d planned for tomorrow, a jaunt into an unmapped stretch of woods in which Gansey had found a stone raven or something that he wanted to investigate. 

 

She’d accepted. Adam had spent most of the next day a ball of nerves.

 

_ When? _ she’d asked.

 

_ After school, _ he’d said, trying to keep his breathing steady.  _ I'll wait outside and walk over with you. _

 

It was not to be a date; she had been crystal clear on that. This, too, was an exploratory jaunt. A careful invitation into one of the more palatable parts of his life that could be dressed up and brought out in public.

 

He only had to loiter a short while outside the front doors of Mountain View: classes let out early at Aglionby on Fridays, but he’d still had to walk halfway across town. When he finally spotted her multi-colored barrettes at the same time that she noticed him and smiled, his stomach did a backflip or two or four.

 

Blue spent a lot of the afternoon hovering near Adam, trying to integrate with the group and mostly making fun of Gansey’s impractical shoes. Traipsing through muddy creeks and thorny underbrush seemed to come as naturally to her as anything else.

 

The air was sticky and still clinging to delusions of summer, sending swarms of gnats and mosquitoes flying into their faces as they crossed back over streams and ditches. Gansey was exuberant, laughing like a prince, even Ronan looked like a smug cat, and after they had stepped off a particularly tall rise, Blue reached over and laced her sweaty fingers with Adam’s.

 

The warm, electric sensation didn’t fade for an hour. Adam knew he was grinning like an idiot.

* * *

_ Yo, Parrish, see if there's any tinfoil around. _

 

The Lynches’ old farmhouse was a maze to Adam; he turned a corner, expecting to find a bathroom, or a staircase, and instead came face-to-face with an old floor-to-ceiling bookcase with glass doors and labels on the shelves. None of them were legible.

 

_ There might be some in Matthew’s room. _

 

Somehow or another he ended up in what must have been Ronan’s old bedroom. There were dreamy baubles on every horizontal surface and twice as many on the floor—origami animals that moved by themselves, lamps with no cords or batteries, notebooks with glossy pages that turned in a nonexistent wind. The smell, too—it was splinters and chilly bare feet and wood-burning stoves and mud on the floors. It was walking into another world.

 

_ Don’t know  _ why _. He probably eats it. _

 

Adam picked up a die-cast car that looked so much like one he’d had when he was younger that it flooded him with some nameless emotion that took the sensation out of all his limbs in a cold rush. He had to sit down.

 

The bed creaked softly under his weight, a sound that was somehow quieter, softer, more removed than he had expected. Adam had a hard time wrapping his head around the idea of a Ronan grown from these walls. But it made perfect sense: how could Ronan have been grown anywhere else? Adam was the intruder here; Adam was the one who could not have come from someplace like this. He found, as he often did, that his left hand had quite subconsciously drifted to his right shoulder, worrying at the tangle of charcoal-silver-violet iridescent lines.

 

He looked up at the knock on the bedroom door. He couldn't remember if he had left it open.

 

There was Ronan, stark and impossible in the daylight streaming through the window, dust motes swirling around his bare feet, a mess of contradictions between the vibrant Marks and the scandal-black barbs of his tattoo swirling out of his tank top. Ronan had always been one part tender loyalty and three parts proud, snarling defiance.

 

Ronan sat on the bed next to Adam, close enough to touch. Even though he couldn't see it, wasn't looking, Adam knew their matching pair of Marks—one iridescent gray-silver-violet, one green-gold-black, from a shoulder-checking in the hallway over a year ago—were pressed together. The silence stretched out too big to cross. His heart was pounding with an inexplicable fury.

 

He’d figured it out months ago. Ronan’s feelings. If that was the word for it—it seemed too deep, too real to be described with a word meaning  _ temporariness _ . It was little things, little kindnesses that were obvious but restrained, words, glances. It was Adam’s own  _ feelings _ that he could not be sure of and it was infuriating. He could analyze endlessly, dissect his own reactions, rationalize the motion of every synapse, but he could not be sure of his feelings for Ronan Lynch.

 

A crow hollered outside. Inside was as still as a summer evening. Dust motes swirled on the floor.

 

Slowly, Ronan lifted his hand to the nape of Adam’s neck, to the short hairs curling in the damp of his sweat. Tugged, ever so gently, a question as much as it was a statement. Then Ronan leaned in and kissed him.

 

It was more than warmth. More than sensation. More than being inside his own body—was he floating away? Fingertips, lips, teeth, tongue, the scrape of stubble—then Ronan was pulling away, his eyes still closed, his mouth still open, his slow breath hot on the skin of Adam’s cheek.

 

Adam couldn’t say anything; his words had drifted away on the dusty sunlight.

 

Ronan blinked his eyes open, once, twice. “I’ll be downstairs,” he said, his voice husky and sanded. Then he got up and walked out of the room, closing the door almost shut behind him.

 

Adam lay back on the bed, stared at the ceiling, listened to the soft pad of Ronan’s footsteps down the stairs. The warmth hadn’t faded; it was everywhere; he was full of it. His hand drifted to his right shoulder. There, the skin felt hot, charged—he was curious—he looked.

 

In place of the swirling charcoal gray, spreading over his shoulder and up his neck and almost down to his elbow, was a vibrant, sunrise red.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Pynch Week 2018  
> Day 1: Soulmate Marks AU


End file.
